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Orientation 2

Naikan In Four Movements

This four-part Naikan series grew out of a course I offered at Baltimore Dharma Group in Spring 2025. While Naikan is often framed as a tool for self-reflection, I came to see it as something more relational: not a system of correction, but a practice of returning—again and again—to what holds us, what flows through us, what we leave behind, and what we remain with.

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Musings from the Meta-Verse: Tip of the Iceberg Cosmologies

Before you begin: please take a moment, settle in, enjoy the image above—of me holding my baby daughter as a first-time dad, tune into the frequency of restful wonder. Now allow your mind to wander outward from the edges of that image: to the room, to the street outside, to the vast sky beyond the vast sky. Further—past the solar system, past the galaxy’s edge, past everything known—to the edge of the cosmos. And then…

The Bright Ones

There were always bright ones—those who moved with a kind of lightness I could never quite inhabit.
They carried sorrow too, but wore it loosely, able to step out into the living world without dragging the depth behind them.
This is a poem about that longing—and the home I eventually found.
–If this speaks to you, you might also find something in Relics of a Firestorm, Woven, or You Were Always Redible.

The Bright Ones

They walked with light at their backs, grief tucked quietly in their pockets, laughter slipping out between silences. What I loved—like a songbird alighting on the branch by my window: not the mirroring of my sorrow, but stepping past it without fear. I wanted to follow— wanted their brightness to pull me clean of my own deep wells. I did not know then: love is not following. It is standing still, arms open, letting brightness and gravity share the same field. I learned this beside her— the one who found the ground I had made ready, who made it her own, whose light I did not have to catch, only to meet.

A life built not by chasing the bright ones, but by learning to let brightness and gravity share the same field.

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